Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?
“It’s incredible,” she said. “The amount of instruments they have. They give you the sense that you’re utterly in control, and that’s the way Bobby was with us. We needed his approval, and he controlled us by making it conditional. Larry had to be a star athlete, and I couldn’t have a little fun talking to a neighbor. For me, the most terrible thing about the crash was imagining him losing control of the aircraft. He must have felt so furious.”
The sky was darkening, the traffic slow. How many millions of dollars did an F-111 cost? How could a nation that called itself Christian spend billions of dollars on weapons of death? The instrument panel of Russ’s Fury consisted of a speedometer and three gauges, one of them broken. The car urgently needed new brakes and new snow tires, but Marion had asked for two hundred dollars for Christmas shopping. The sum had struck him as excessive, but he’d been mindful of how little else he’d given her lately, mindful of the four hours alone with Frances that he’d contrived to give himself for Christmas. He’d imagined that the four hours would fly by all too quickly. Now he wondered how he could survive another minute of hearing about the kind of man she loved. There was a hard, sour knot in his throat.
“I’ve been talking a lot to Kitty about this,” Frances said. “I’m never going to be a bra-burner, but she’s given me some books that make a lot of sense to me. It’s not that Bobby was physically abusive. He was just cold, cold, cold. In a way, though, that was almost worse. I was the little wife, and the only thing that mattered was that I do everything exactly right. It was the opposite of a marriage of equals. When I look back now, I realize that our neighbors all thought I was married to a jerk. The only people who didn’t think so were his pilot buddies, and they were jerks, too. I mean, obviously, it’s terrible, the way he died—I feel so sorry for him. But sometimes I almost wonder if I’m better off without him. Is that bad of me?”
“Marriage is difficult,” Russ said.
“But does it have to be difficult? Is yours difficult? Or—sorry, maybe I can’t ask that.”
If Russ had had the nerves of a test pilot or a heart surgeon, now would have been the time to open his heart and declare that his marriage was a miserable thing, held together by habit and vow and duty. Now would have been the time to make his pitch. But his complaint with Marion was that she was heavy and joyless, unexciting to him, dulling of his edge. He didn’t see how he could voice this complaint without sounding like a jerk.
“Anyway,” Frances said, “you did me a huge favor, putting me in touch with Kitty and getting me into the Tuesday circle. It’s exactly what I needed. I’ve been taking a class at Triton College, and that’s been good, too. All in all, I was having a pretty good fall. But then—”
“I know,” Russ said. “I want to apologize again for what happened with Ronnie. That was my mistake.”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks. You don’t have to apologize. What happened was that Philip got in touch with me again. He called me out of the blue and said his mind was clearer now. He’d broken things off with the nurse, and could I find it in my heart to forgive him? I didn’t think I could, but he sent me roses and called me up again. He really turned on the charm, and things just kind of clicked. The weekend after Thanksgiving, after the thing with Ronnie, I went in to the city and had a whole afternoon and evening with him.”
The snow was still melting when it hit the pavement, but the forecast called for as much as eight inches. If Russ and Frances got stuck somewhere, it would mean additional hours with a heart surgeon’s girlfriend.
“Everything felt different, though,” she said. “It was partly the books I’ve been reading, but it was partly—it was partly what you’ve given me. I mean, the Tuesday circle, and, I don’t know, just the example of a different kind of man. Philip took me to Binyon’s, and when the waiter came he took the menu out of my hand and ordered for me. The old me would have liked that—it would have made me feel safe. But—and then we were in his apartment, with the amazing view, and I was looking at the family pictures on his piano. I picked one up, and I must have set it down wrong, because he came over and moved it, like, one inch further back. He came all the way across the room to move the picture one inch. Which probably makes him a great surgeon, but I thought to myself: Uh-oh. Here we go again. You know what I mean?”